So many people to be grateful for in this life of mine – that’s the joy of a diagnosis of bipolar – a unique personal journey of self-discovery.

The two key people I have to thank for the progress I have made post-diagnosis are Horatio Clare for his book “Heavy light” and Dr John DeMartini and his Breakthrough Experience which both confirmed to me the root cause of a diagnosis of bipolar.

This is an extract from Horatio Clare’s memoir:

“This is a shortened account of a process which took many sessions, Jane helps me to accept that I did nothing wrong, that I  should not have been put in that position, that a little child needs his mother in the house and that, crucially, it is OK to have feelings, to express them and not to hide them, that no shame or guilt need be attached to them. It seems I have spent years, much of my life, concealing many true feelings from myself and others.

We spend weeks on other scenes, especially one in which my brother and I are with my father in a playground in Holland Park one evening after school…..

…Though it feels fruitless sometimes, and repetitive at others, the work Jane does with me on this scene changes my life. I experience and understand feelings about my father, my mother and myself I did not know I had.

In summary, it seems that around this time I had learned to split myself into an appearance and a reality.

Perhaps, then the splitting inside me, dividing what I felt from ways in which I appeared and behaved, would not have been so deep, so long-lasting.

Where psychiatry offered me nothing but pills which inflict proven, long-term damage and, while attacking their symptoms, do nothing to address the causes of trauma and psychosis, psychotherapy changed my life, relatively quickly.”

It took me a decade of dealing with mental health services and psychiatry to realise they knew nothing about bipolar and nothing about mental illness. To read Horatio Clare’s memoir was wonderful and to read it during the pandemic was perfect timing.

I attended The Breakthrough Experience with Dr John DeMartini in Melbourne in February 2020 as the covid 19 pandemic was emerging globally – again synchronous timing.

During this training event, I ended up having Dr DeMartini towering over me telling me I had an imbalanced perception of my life story and that I could effect a healthier and more balanced perspective by going through each memory of my childhood and teenage years and examine the imbalances and balance them. I was amazed I had created my mental illness and even more amazed that I could heal the imbalances by opening my eyes more widely to each of the supposed dramas with my parents which were not actually anything to do with me but that which I had taken responsibility for.

The extracts below offer a flavour of what Dr John DeMartini has to say about the diagnosis of bipolar:

Keys to a healthy mental state – 16:58
“And if we set up a fantasy that we’re supposed to be always up, always nice and always one-sided, I think we set ourselves up for bipolar conditions because we’re expecting a one-sided world—I educate people to try to ground them a bit, because I think the people that are grounded are farther along in achievements in their ability to adapt to changing environments, and stress is the inability to adapt”

“ And if we set up a fantasy that we’re supposed to To be always up supposed to be always nice, always supposed to be one sided. I think we set ourselves up for bipolar conditions, because we were expecting a one sided world. I don’t think it’s fair to people. I don’t think it grounds them. I don’t think it’s subjective. I don’t think it has any basis in reality. And I think it’s being promulgated. And it’s being used as a marketing mechanism, to mislead people into thinking that life is supposed to be a one sided world and it’s not. And we grew up, it’s already been known in biology and evolutionary theories, that it’s essential to have support and challenge to grow. You need that for her nieces for adapting to environments, even the the COVID virus if we don’t get if we isolate people so much that we don’t even allow their immune systems to get some sort of stimulus, we can actually work against us and the immune response. immune response is designed to be bombarded by things on a daily basis and to be able to respond and keep adapting. And if we sit there and create a pink, you know, glasses and the life supposed to be one thing I think we’re not preparing the world for what’s really involved. I think that’s a disservice to people, I think it’s wise to give them a grounded reality and what objectivity means even mind. Neutral mind. It’s where you’re way more resilient. If you set up a thing, it’s I’m supposed to be more positive than negative, more happy than sad, more kind of cruel, or, you know, peaceful than raffle. Then when the other side comes, you think there’s a mistake, there’s something wrong, when in fact, it’s absolutely perfectly normal and healthy to have those things. So I think that that’s misleading people. And, you know, I educate people to try to ground them a bit. Because I think the people that are grounded and have more of objective views are farther along in the achievements, and then their ability to adapt to changing environments and stresses, inability to adapt.”

Source: https://psychiatryinstitute.com/podcast/human-mind-polymaths-demartini/